LAUSANNE, Switzerland -- IOC leaders dropped wrestling from the Olympic program on Tuesday, a surprise decision that removes one of the oldest Olympic sports from the 2020 Games.

The IOC executive board decided to retain modern pentathlon -- the event considered most at risk -- and remove wrestling instead from its list of 25 "core sports."

The IOC board acted after reviewing the 26 sports on the current Olympic program. Eliminating one sport allows the International Olympic Committee to add a new sport to the program later this year.

Wrestling, which combines freestyle and Greco-Roman events, goes back to the inaugural modern Olympics in Athens in 1896.

"This is a process of renewing and renovating the program for the Olympics," IOC spokesman Mark Adams said. "In the view of the executive board, this was the best program for the Olympic Games in 2020. It's not a case of what's wrong with wrestling, it is what's right with the 25 core sports."

Tough to have high TV ratings when its never on. If that’s one of the criteria half of the “sports” would be gone. Wrestling was one of the few remaining actual sports. Seems the IOC is trying to turn the Olympics into a more mainstram X Games. While its a niche sport for wrestlers and parents tradition should not be overlooked. Golf should never have gotten in and wrestling never eliminated. And I loves me some golf, just don’t think its worthy of a Gold Medal.

Why do we even have the Olympics?? Every sport has it's own money making business. International competition is a waste of everyone's time. If you're good, you're good.

One year this one wins, the next year another one wins etc etc...

Every sport is doping. Every judge is subject to bribes.

My all time favorite will always be....The guy steps up and addresses the ball: "How do you do sir?" Then he clubs "sir" to death....again and again and again...and wins a lot of money if he clubs his "sir" better than the next guy.

Out of that list the only ones that come close to being as "core" as wrestling are athletics and weightlifting. Boxing comes close, but the international side of that sport is so disgraced that it makes me wish we still only had to deal with throwing out "soviet judge's" score.

Seriously. Handball, field hockey, badminton, table tennis? By the way, table tennis people hate it when you call it ping pong.

too bad. outside of gymnastics, that was the only sport left in the olympics of interest to me (being a participant in my youth). oh well, socialism, doesn’t play well with the individual sport of wrestling.

The Olympics was so much that was good. It was a search for excellence in the human activities, the search for honor, and a search for competition for its own sake.

If you walk next to the original Olympic Stadium which still stands, you see a row of statues, names still visible carved into the bases, not to the victors to memorialize the greatness of their accomplishments, but rather to the cheaters, to record forever the shame of their cheating. The shame was eternal.

The winners received laurels which were wreaths around their heads to wear on the way home and thus show the honors of their victories. The gift was of fleeting moment, but the highest personal honor.

Now, we honor the winners with modern day statues in the forms of gifts of money and contracts, to try to give them everlasting fame, and we fleetingly shame the cheaters by giving them a temporary thistle of shame, which withers, dies and blows away, never to be remembered.

The Olympics were to compete in a field of honor, and politics were set aside, so as to allow safe passage through enemy territory for the purpose of the competition and for safe return.

Now, the politics guide the Olympics, wars are not suspended for their ceremony, and it is nothing more than a commercial enterprise on an international scale.

I am sad that wrestling has ended, but I am more sad that the Olympic Spirit died long ago, anyway.

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